Museums overlooked in election policies

• Margaret Anderson

25 January 2008Everyone agrees that museums are important. But they were neglected in the election policies of the major parties in the lead up to last year's federal election.

In the Council of Australasian Museum Directors annual survey of major museums. It was found that:

* Museums remain amongst the most popular of all cultural and tourism sites, with close to 12.5 million visits in this year alone to museums in Australia and New Zealand.

* The number of virtual visitors has risen even more spectacularly. A staggering 51 million virtual visitors logged on to museum websites during the year - an increase of 34 per cent in just 12 months.

The pressure is really on museums to meet this expanding demand for information, both from visitors and increasingly sophisticated on-line consumers but, said CAMD Chair Margaret Anderson, 'many museums are struggling to find the resources to digitize their collections. Museum budgets have not kept pace with greater public use, particularly in areas like the new technologies.'

As Australians search for answers to the urgent national and global questions of the day ? reconciliation, national identity, biodiversity, climate change, water ? they turn increasingly to these collections to benchmark the present and suggest directions for the future.

In 2006-07, these and many other issues were explored through 200 new exhibitions, education programs for over 1.45 million students, close to 480 scholarly publications and over 180 programs and exhibitions highlighting issues of cultural diversity.

Margaret Anderson said 'Museums enjoy great public trust. As we move to come to terms with the great social and scientific issues of our time museums will be increasingly crucial to research programs and to public education and debate.'

Does public policy reflect the pivotal role museums can play? Margaret Anderson believes there is room for improvement. 'Museums have fallen behind the arts in national cultural policy in the past decade. There is a need for new national policy directions to support museums and enable them to meet the demands of the future.